My Blog, 2008 year in review

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

My 2009 New Year’s Resolutions

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling
  • launch notPopular.com v3.0
  • start training Muay Thai again
  • start riding my bike again
  • lose some weight, get back into shape
  • be sick less (aka take better care of myself)
  • agressively promote Hold Fast Pomade
  • work more with TechZulu
  • break into the top 1000 twitter users (currently im #4,270)
  • take a nice vacation with the wife
  • write an iPhone app
  • hiking / camping with the boys
  • get a few more tattoos
  • launch StraightVege.com
  • improve LoudSon.gs
  • read more books
  • pay off my credit cards
  • become a dad?!

Update 01/11/09 : So far this year is off to a solid start, notpop 3.0 is launched, and I have been going to muay thai training for the last week and a half. I hope this momentum keeps up!

Update 03/15/09: I have been training muay thai and running for 3 months now. I’ve lost some weight and mycardio is increasing. I think it counts as getting back into shape. I’m hoping to have a fight in a month

Update 06/15/09: I launched my first iPhone app, RotoPhoto. The app costs $0.99 USD and is available in the iTunes store. The iPhone SDK has a steep learning curve but I’m getting the hang of it, and Mac OS X.

Update 06/29/09: I rewrote several of the aspects of LoudSon.gs. The URLs are now cleaner and the web app should be much more responsive now. I <3 CodeIgniter.

Update 07/15/09: I am just now finishing up my 4th book of the year. I know for some this might not be a lot, but for me I think its a huge leap. Since college I had read 2  books (one being the Bible) on my own. Now this year I’m on pace to finish 8 or 9. Most of the books are of the marketing, investing and self help variety 🙂

straight rollin on dubs

By Josh Highland in hardware, Josh's Rambling

Believe it or not, but up until the other day I have never owned an LCD monitor. I had dual 19in CRT monitors. They were heavy, took up lots of space and put of a ton of heat. The other day one of the CRTs started to get weird and the brightness started to go, there for both of the monitors needed to go.

I hit up the local Best Buy and got two glossy new 22in monitors. Do the math, thats 44 inches. Completely excessive and completely necessary at the same time. This photo doesn’t do justice to how amazing it feels, and it does feel amazing.

rollin-on-dubs

It’s a solid way to round out 2008. Straight rollin on dubs!

Modifying MimboPro to Add Paged Navigation To Category Pages

By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, php, tutorials, web 2.0, wordpress

Recently I have been doing a lot of work with WordPress. I love WordPress. one of the things I like most about WordPress is the plugins and themes.

I recently bought a copy of the MimboPro theme. Mimbo is clean and very professional. More of a CMS theme then a blogging theme, prefect for what I want to use it for.

As I dug into MimboPro and WordPress, I realized something strange, the MimboPro theme doesn’t support paging in a category view. What this means is EVERY SINGLE post you make is shown on one page. If you have a very active site, like the one I’m working on, this quickly gets out of hand. Look at this image and you will see what I mean (click for full version).

One of the reasons I like MimboPro was the support that the authors of the theme offer. I headed over to their message forums and found other people like me asking for the Additon of Paged Navigation To Category Pages. The original post was 8 months ago, and no one had resolved anything. I made a post to the MimboPro authors only to be told that there is going to be a new theme that will handle this and it will be available at a deep discount to MimboPro owner. This upset me a bit, so taking matters into my own hand, I fixed what Mimbo wont, and I am handing out my own patch to solve this issue. Below are the instructions to hack your own files, or you can just download my zip file with the pre-hacked files.

Pre-Hacked Files:
Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip

DIY INSTRUCTIONS (click images for full sizes):

  1. Save a copy of your current categories.php and styles.css files inside of the MimboPro theme directory to a safe location
  2. Open up categories.php inside of the MimboPro theme directory, and find line 17
  3. Comment line 17 with a double back slash (//)
  4. Go to line 87 of category.php and add the following code
  5. Save and close category.php
  6. Open up style.css inside of the MimboPro theme directory
  7. Add the following CSS code to the bottom of the file (should be close to line 852)
  8. Save styles.css
  9. Upload categories.php and styles.css to the MimboPro theme directory on your server
  10. Everything should be working. Here is what my wordpress running MimboPro looks like

That’s it! MimboPro will now have paging in all of the categories. The next and previous links will only show up when you have enough posts. The WordPress default is 10 posts. You can edit the number of posts by going to change the number of posts to show on a category page, go into to the admin and under “setting” > “reading” you will find the option, as highlighted here.

If you had any problem reading the code in the image files, download the zip files with the pre-hacked files in them.

Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip

If you have any further questions, please post them in the comment.